Notice for yourself how often you and others mean intellectual understanding when you
talk about understanding something. Intellectual reasoning is an important part of
understanding "What Is Going On" in the modern world, but, rightly understood, we can
never reach a full living human understanding solely through dead abstractions of thought.
Every word was once a living metaphor and has now been flatten into a dead shell, a token
which has replaced the living, burning, moving, vibrating reality it is taken to represent,
namely, a map.

[page xii, Barton] Education for life, if it is to have real meaning, creates
warmth, love, and enthusiasm in the child's soul, out of which deeper
understanding can later be born.

In learning something new, it's best to learn all about it before you start. That is why
Barton's Introduction is so important to study and absorb fully before we dig into the rest
of this book. He pinpoints Steiner's insight of how our intellect comes from the past and our
will carries us into the future, explaining how we merge with others in an often unconscious
and yet meaning-full way.

[page xii, Barton] At the other pole from the intellect, which is
past-related in Steiner's view of the human being, lies the will, a faculty,
that carries us into the future, is born in warmth, and is by definition
much less easily accessible to our conscious perceptions. It is through
the will that we relate in moral intuition to others in society, that we
actually 'engage with life', changing and shaping it for the future. Thus
social interaction between two or more people, as the core and essence
of all society, involves an unconscious element: in a continual
alternation, we only perceive others by momentarily 'dreaming into and
falling asleep' in them, then waking up to ourselves again. To be alive
to the reality of this process is to allow others' reality to inform us, is to
honor the gifts that each one brings and to incorporate them into a
living weft of mutuality, an awareness of reciprocal dependence that
enlarges us, as opposed to the construct of an 'agenda' or 'program' for
social reform pursued or imposed (inevitably in a top-down manner)
without this awareness.

What is an agenda or program? Rightly understood, it is an intellectual construct
which requires coercion to implement. Steiner's attempts to install a three-fold society
foundered on the reefs of a society which only understood using coercion to implement its
programs. One hundred years later, coercion is still the main tool of every form of so-called
government, some to a greater or lesser extent.

Each of the three spheres of society, the citadel, the market, and the altar, depend upon
coercion to exist. Spencer Heath coined these names in his eponymous 1957 book, meaning
by them:

[From my review of Heath's Citadel, Market, and Altar] The citadel is
the regulatory, law enforcement, defense organization of the society.
The market is the economic sphere and all that it entails in every kind
of production and service enterprise. The altar is the cultural sphere
that encompasses all the areas of human endeavor outside of regulation
and economic activities.

If you study Steiner's threefold society, you will find he divided society into those three
activities. The problem in a nutshell was how to keep these three folds from interfering with
each other? The citadel as the enforcement arm will want to control the market (economic
arm) and the altar (cultural arm). True government will regulate without coercion, but until
that day arrives, we are stuck with so-called government which coerces to achieve its
programs and goals for the economy and culture. Even Steiner with his amazing insight and
ingenuity could not work out a way of achieving independence of the three folds of society
because of the overweening power wielded by the so-called government bodies which were
simply coercive tyrannies masquerading as governments.

Steiner was right in saying that his three-fold ideas were "not abstract ideas but contain
the seeds of true development which, like any reality, might assume very varied and diverse
forms in actual and always different conditions." (Page xiii)

[page xiii, Barton] Steiner warns us against nationalism, utilitarianism
and any other 'ism'. Like Dickens before him in his humorous and
ironic depiction of the bureaucratic 'Circumlocution Office', he pours
gentle scorn on the exponentially increasing 'data' (Lecture 11) in which
we can have such misguided faith, in the numerical or quantitative mass
of proofs and evidence that clog our shallower minds. He warns,
somewhat prophetically, against our failure to think or create for
ourselves because of all that is 'given' to us on a plate, without any need
for us to process it ourselves (using only our thinking).

In achieving a three-fold society, we must first arrive at a government which operates
completely without coercion. Forget for a moment that you imagine this is impossible —
that is after all only a thinking process. Every great idea was once an impossibility, was it
not? Without coercion, the citadel, market, and altar will operate independently, will they
not? Perhaps there is a way to create a government that governs and does not coerce, and
if so, a three-fold society will be created as a natural result.

Until 1981 or so, I did not consider it possible for there to be a society without coercion;
I always assumed some coercion would be necessary. That was before I took Dr. Andrew
Joseph Galambos's course in Volitional Science. Slowly it dawned on me that when a
majority of people understand Galambos's amazing definition of freedom, we will be on a
one-way path to a government absent all coercion. It took almost twenty years before a book
appeared containing his amazing concepts and I was able to review it. Galambos's work
provides us each a way "to progress from morality based on authority to conduct based on
moral insight." (Rudolf Steiner, page 102 of Philosophy of Freedom)

Galambos gives us the moral insight.

What is Galambos's definition of freedom and how can it have anything to do with
morality in the sense that Steiner means it? Succinctly put, Galambos posits: "freedom is
the societal condition that exists when one has 100% control over one's life and all
non-procreative derivatives of one's life." Below is a short excerpt from my review of his
book which explains the connection between freedom and moral insight.

[Adapted from my Sic Itur Ad Astra Review] Galambos gives us an
operational definition of morality that is simple, easy to understand and
to explain, "any action is moral that does not involve coercion." In other
words, any action taken in freedom, is moral, by the definition of
freedom. "To live in the love of action and to let live in the
understanding of the other person's volition is the maxim of free human
beings," as Steiner said. A moral person is one who lives in freedom and
uses the 100% control of one's property in harmonious synchronism
with other moral persons and all persons remain free human beings
thereby.
If this sounds impossible, it's not, as it violates no fundamental
law of nature. If this sounds like it's never existed before, it hasn't. For
a short time following the founding of the United States of America,
when the forces of coercion had not yet organized, enough ability to
have 100% control over one's property existed to foster an enormous
increase of prosperity. By the mid-1800s the coercion of King George
had been replaced the coercion of a bureaucracy and the United States
began its slide down from the 100% Freedom end of the Ideological
Spectrum to something much lower.

Galambos was a materialistic scientist, a rocket scientist, who found that he could not
do his work in freedom, so he worked on creating the conditions of freedom for himself and
others. He was criticized by some who claimed that his basic principle of freedom was
"obscurely mystical and lacking in clarity". Steiner encountered a similar criticism in his
time.

[page 1, italics added] Anthroposophists often say that our movement
ought not to have burdened itself with what is implicit in the movement
for a threefold social organism. And on the other hand, some of those
whose interest has been awoken for this social movement find it
troubling that this idea began with an anthroposophic outlook which
they may often feel to be obscurely mystical and lacking in clarity.

What can one learn from Galambos? For me it was to avoid dancing with the forces of
coercion. If I get a speeding ticket, I pay. Tax bill, pay it. If you resist the forces of coercion,
it's like wrestling with pigs: you both get dirty and the pigs love it. Respect everyone's
freedom at every level and avoid those who don't.

In Lecture 2, Steiner reveals the connection between memorizing and digesting. When
you memorize some data or digest some food, you use the same power for both.

[page 17] One very important faculty in ordinary life, as we have
frequently discussed, is the power of memory, which we use inwardly
whenever we recall something we once experienced. But as you all
know, this memory faculty has a curious quality: we both do and yet do
not entirely control it. Many struggle to remember something but can't.
This desire to remember accompanied by a failure to fully remember is
due to the fact that the same power we use inwardly as faculty of
memory also serves to transform the food we digest into substances that
our body can use. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is converted
inside you into a substance that serves your life processes, this appears
to be a physical occurrence. Yet this physical process is governed by
supersensible powers — and these are the same that you use when you
remember things. The same kind of forces are used for memory on the
one hand and for assimilation of nutrients on the other.

When you are hungry it becomes very difficult to memorize something. You may have
never noticed this because you likely have interrupted any memorization work yourself to
get something to eat or drink. We swing back and forth from soul to body when doing
memory and digesting work. Digesting is body work and takes energy away from the soul
work of memorizing. A good rule is to alternate the two processes: "Remember, then Eat;
Eat, then Remember." This avoids a battle between the two.

[page 17, 18] When you try to remember something, you always have to
wage an inner battle — which occurs in the unconscious — between a
soul process and a bodily one. If you consider the faculty of memory in
these terms, this is the best way to recognize the foolishness, from a
higher vantage point, of seeing some people as idealists and others as
materialists. Digestion and assimilation of nutrients in the human body
is without doubt a material process. The forces governing it are the
same, though, as are active in a process of ideation: the powers at work
in our memory faculty. We only have a true view of the world when we
see it neither materialistically nor idealistically but instead are able to
recognize the ideal nature of material phenomena, and equally to trace
the entirely material processes underlying ideal ones.

Do you imagine the sensory world closely surrounding us and the supersensible world
as spreading out indefinitely all around us? Such a commonplace view will not help you to
understand the reality of a human being. Instead Steiner suggests we imagine the sensory
world of the human as a straight horizontal line with the supersensible world of cognition
impinging on it from above and the subsensible world of will from below.

The supersensible forces of cognition from outside the Earth and the subsensible forces of will come to us from inside the Earth from the moment of our birth.(3) We
undergo a progression from forces within the Earth from birth to age 7, then we move to
forces of the atmosphere from 7 to 14, and then to forces of the planets from 14 to 21. In the
last phase the human passes from the subsensible to the supersensible, and "The forces of
the whole solar system . . . now exert an organizing effect upon the young person." (Page
20)

From age 21, wisely considered as the age of majority, "we must draw from ourselves
what we need to live."

[page 21] We must slowly draw up again the forces of the earth and the
planetary system that we previously led downward into our organism.
To ensure this always happened in the past, the forces of human
blood were active. The human being was able to draw forth the earth's
forces from himself without having learned to do so. He did this as an
unconscious process; it lay within his blood. He had been configured
and organized in a way that enabled him to do so. In our own time —
though this of course encompasses a long period of centuries — a
significant change is that human blood is losing the power to draw forth
what has been configured into the organism in this way up to the age of
21.

The waning forces of our human blood can no longer do consciously what earlier they
did for us unconsciously. We need a practical way of dealing with this change of humanity's
evolution.

What is the power of an unanswered question? is one of my basic rules of life and is
of crucial importance in the proper education of children(4). Leave children with
unanswered questions which will live in them and these unanswered questions will come
back to them with powerful answers, which, as adults, they have become ready to receive.
But, outside of Waldorf systems and similarly enlightened schools, teachers today strive to
talk down to a child's understanding by answering a child's questions fully. Doing so, they
produce children who are encouraged to respond to any new information with a perfunctory,
"I know that!" and miss a chance of learning anything new in the currently received
information, either now or in the future. If this makes little sense to you now, may I suggest
you hold it as an unanswered question?

Steiner was aware of this trend which was already obvious a hundred years ago and has
gotten worse today. Children are expected to receive the teacher's presentation silently and
to have a feeling of knowing everything about the subject thereafter. We need teachers who
do not teach down to children's current level of learning but rather teach up to children's
expanded possibilities today.

"Meanings flow from soul to soul on the wings of words" is a concept I wrote about
in a Final Paper for a Ph.D. level course in College Teaching. When a teacher has absorbed
the material to be presented in her lesson plan, then presents it to her child with an inspiring
enthusiasm, the child's soul absorbs all of the teacher's meanings, even those the teacher
only felt in her soul, and all these feelings become a source of deep learning for the child,
possibly appearing in the child as a maturing adult 10 or 20 years later.

[page 22, 23] The child assimilates it through living in the warmth that
emanates from the teacher. The child absorbs something that goes
beyond its understanding, doing so simply because of the teacher's
infectious warmth and enthusiasm. The child does not yet understand
what was absorbed, but it settles into the child's mind and soul. And
what a child has absorbed in this way at age 10 is something the adult
may remember at age 30.

Rule-based or normative pedagogy which enforces standards on teachers and students
are silly, rightly understood. Steiner parodies it this way:

[page 23, 24] At our present level of consciousness we ought to regard
this really as if we were to refrain from eating until we have understood
that the human being is composed of carbohydrates, proteins and so on,
that they are converted thus and thus in the body. It is like thinking we
should not eat before we have understood the physiological processes of
digestion.

What was beginning during Steiner's time, is rampant behavior in our time, with the
amount of various components of our foods stamped on the outside of the packages we buy.
As a result, one no longer needs a scale — a calculator, perhaps, which thank God few
people use while eating today.

[page 24] I once told you, and you may have had the same experience,
that on visiting someone on one occasion I saw he had a pair of scales
next to his plate. He placed a piece of meat on the scales, and weighed
it, since he was only allowed to eat a very specific amount of meat. Here
physiology dictates appetite. But, thank God, we have not yet come to
the point when everyone does this.

And yet, we have come to a similar silly approach to creating teachers who use rule-based or normative pedagogy, weighing on a scale every skosh of subject material a child
should learn and be tested upon later. This tends to create children who are good at
intellectual test-taking and are otherwise vacuous shells of living human beings. Normative
pedagogy is as useful to a learning child as the study of the aesthetics of color is to a
working oil painter, rightly understood.

[page 24, 25] Most people know this, and yet they do not recognize that
one should also teach, teach in a lively and living way, without having
absorbed this normative pedagogy.. . . you must learn from the child
how you must teach the child. . . . When the child stands there before
you, again you are completely electrified by this developing human
being and by what you need to do to teach the child.

In 869 the Eighth General Council of the Church decreed that thenceforth humans were
to be considered only body and soul, eliminating the spirit as a third and equal component.
Yes, the soul would be accorded a few spiritual properties, but the trichotomy of body, soul,
and spirit were gone forever. The time has come for humans to understand the importance
of the spirit in holding body and soul together.

Steiner gives us the metaphor of a bronze signet ring and sealing wax to help us
understand the role of spirit. Mr. Smith's ring has SMITH sculpted into its surface and when
it is pressed into wax, the name SMITH appears in the wax.

[page 39] The fact that this is 'Smith' has no connection whatever with
the bronze itself, not its constituents, but with a real, living element. The
fact that a person is called Smith is related to life and points to the
whole breadth of life. So here we have the soul-spirit, and here the body.
The soul-spirit imprints itself in corporeality. But the element that is the
same in both of them, the spirit, is a whole, wide world. We do not
comprehend the spirit if we only ever regard the soul, just as little as we
learn to recognize Mr Smith if we only look at the signet. Nor do we
comprehend the spirit if we merely gaze at the material world, just as
little as we recognize Mr Smith by staring at the sealing wax.
It is a matter, therefore, of the spirit mediating the interplay and
relationship between soul and body. And in our era we are in a phase
of humanity's evolution in which it is vital to comprehend this fact
properly.

We are citizens of the cosmos, and we only appreciate this when we grasp our human
nature spiritually. Spirit is not something added onto soul as religions would have us accept
as truth; in truth, spirit is an essential part of our human nature and without us imparting our
human form to Earth after death, the Earth would die, lacking all spirit.

[page 40, italics added] Ordinary science only considers the human
being as a creature whose life ends at death. All it can observe
thereafter are the bodily remains, and how these are cremated or
returned to the earth, becoming dust. Now it would be possible to study
the constituents in this human dust, the residue of the human organism.
Science will say that human substance decomposes and rejoins the
earth. Well, this is not even a fraction of the truth: it isn't true at all. You
see, what is given back to the earth, irrespective of whether the body is
cremated or buried, once had human form and had this also by virtue
of the fact that before birth, or before conception, a being of spirit and
soul descended from worlds of spirit and worked within this physical
body until death. Then this physical body is given to the earth; and the
nature of human form works on in the earth, irrespective of whether the
body was cremated or buried, and continues to collaborate with the
earth. To the earth is continually imparted something that it would not
have if human bodies were not given up to it at death; the earth benefits
from this. Otherwise, if it did not receive human bodies, the earth would
only possess earthly substances.

During its Polaric morning and long Lemurian afternoon, Earth possessed uplifting
forces, but since the middle of the Atlantean evening, these forces have been withering and
yet kept refreshed by the formative forces of deceased humans which enter the Earth making
the Earth a habitable place for living humans on its surface.

[page 41] When we are born we bear soul-spiritual forces from the
spiritual universe into the earthly realm, and use them as long as we
need them, until death; then we give them to the earth as formative
powers and so become collaborators helping to shape the future earth.

We are not an insignificant animal roaming on a tiny speck of dust on the edge of one
of many galaxies in a huge universe. We are born out of the universe to be co-creators of
our world, "a mediator between the world of spirit and this physical world of earth."(Page
41)

Of what use is all this knowledge, people may ask you? Steiner says your knowledge is
not especially valuable; it is what you become through knowledge that is valuable. (Page 42)

Take for example the knowledge that humans were strongly penetrated by materialism
by the fifteenth century, what can we do with that? We can expect that our turning to more
spiritual understandings will be made difficult by such materialistic people, especially those in religious
confessions (churches) which find it difficult to comprehend anything truly spiritual. Steiner
gives an example of talking to such a religious person about the intensely spiritual painting
of Raphael known as The Disputa, that both them were standing in front of.

[page 43] In the course of our conversation, I tried to illustrate
something by relating it to this painting. I said that anyone who seeks
to cultivate the life of spirit must come to the point of recognizing why
Raphael, in the consciousness of his time, painted The Disputa. Above
we see the heavenly worlds with the Trinity, below the sacrament on the
altar, and the Church Fathers and theologians. But on their own none
of these things are the most essential aspect of the painting. What is
essential is this: that a theologian with deeper insight — and many no
longer had this at the time — who took his theology seriously, as
Raphael did, so that its soul imbued his painting, would know that when
the host, the sacrament, has been consecrated, and one gazed through
it, one gazed upon the world that Raphael painted in the upper portion
of The Disputa. The consecrated host really is the means to gaze through
into the world of spirit; and that is why Raphael painted it in this way.
That was by way of example. And what I mean is that we must find the
path back to comprehending the true content of such a painting, which
was painted out of a consciousness different from our own.

Steiner admitted that he could not imitate the grimace of the theologian when encouraged to see
his holiest sacrament in this spiritual fashion. (Page 43) And yet priests have been trained since
the beginning to hold the consecrated host in front of the communicant to be observed while he
says, "Body of Christ" and the communicant replies, "Amen." This indicates that in early
centuries priests and communicants could observe the spiritual scene as a
living reality that Raphael later painted. Only when this spiritual scene faded from view did the question of
transubstantiation arise. As Steiner says, "Discussion arises when knowledge disappears."

Raphael could
not view Christ as a "simple man of Nazareth", but viewed Him instead as Christ Jesus, a
simple man of Nazareth, yes, but with the Great Christ Spirit residing in him after his
Baptism by John in the Jordan.

[page 43, 44] For theologians today, the 'simple man of Nazareth', as
they define him, is just a figure like Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, albeit
a little more elevated. Theology itself has become materialistic.

Can you grasp the difficulties for modern humans to unite the materialistic and spiritual,
as future humanity requires?

[page 45] To be either materialist or spiritual in outlook is simply to fall
back into older modes of human feeling. Only if you can be both, so that
both livingly interpenetrate, can you become equal to the contemporary
needs of human society.

In Lecture 4, Steiner urges us to comprehend and to act. He points to two things
responsible for the decline of our civilization: 1) the lack of a scientific element and 2) the
lack of an impulse for freedom. Lacking both understanding and actions in freedom, humans
end up as religious marionettes in the hands of church leaders.

Science alone cannot provide these new ideas, until we have a science which
incorporates the cosmos into itself.

[page 60] Without incorporating the cosmos, as a cosmogony, science
cannot provide us with inner, human impulses that sustain us through
our lives. In today's world we can no longer live instinctively. We have
to become conscious. We need a cosmogony and we need true freedom.
We do not just need phrases about it, mere talk on the subject of
freedom, but a real incorporation of freedom into our immediate
existence. And this can only come about on paths that lead to ethical
individualism.

What does Steiner mean by ethical individualism? When I was eighteen and beginning
college, I found a treasure of books in the college bookstores. Books I never found in our
town's public library nor in my high school library in a rural area. The most important to me
was Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays. It was in his famous essay, Self-Reliance, that I first
encountered ethical individualism. Later I found it in Galambos's courses in Volitional
Science, and still later in Rudolf Steiner's various works.

Here's how Steiner defines it in Lecture 4:

[page 60] Ethical individualism is nothing other than a personal
realization of freedom. The best people simply failed to grasp that
something such as I was urging in The Philosophy of Freedom was
drawn from the actual needs and impulses of the time.

Emerson's Self-Reliance was his way for achieving "a personal realization of freedom".
What both Steiner, Emerson, Spencer Heath and other proponents of freedom needed was
an operation definition of the word freedom. Lacking that, our minds are beset with
ambiguities when reading these great thinkers talking about freedom. Freedom seems to
morph into selfish and egotistical actions, and it slides farther and farther away from any
semblance of ethical individualism.

Now add in Galambos's amazing definition of freedom and things become simple. You
immediately have a test to determine if an action is done in freedom, an action of ethical
individualism. How? An operational definition is one which allows you to apply an
operation to an action by which you can determine if the action fits the definition.

Is Action A an action done in freedom? Operate on A using the definition to quickly
determine if A was done in freedom. Here's Galambos's definition of freedom: "freedom
is the societal condition that exists when one has 100% control over one's life and all
non-procreative derivatives of one's life."

These three examples will help to show how this works on the three kinds of things
one can acquire as derivatives of one's life.

Example 1: A man kills someone. Was this done in freedom? No,
because the deceased had his life taken from him.

Example 2: A woman writes a screenplay and a foreign company makes
a movie of it without her permission. Was this done in freedom? No,
because the woman's thoughts and ideas are a derivative of her life and
were used without her permission.

Example 3: A man's new auto is stolen from him. Was this done in
freedom? No, because the idea to buy that auto was a derivative of the
man's life and it was removed from him without his permission.

When one operates in freedom, by this definition, one will be following an ethical
individualism and no other human will be killed, be offended, or feel cheated by this
person's actions. This is a way of acting in freedom which one can apply in one's own life
today. Good habits tend to be copied by other people, so one person's habits will be copied
by others. As the number of people acting in freedom increases, at some point people who
don't act in freedom will find no one willing to cooperate with them. This will put an
enormous pressure on them to change their behavior and act in freedom. Gradually and
inevitably, coercion will disappear, and the three-folds of citadel, market, and altar will be
able to operate independently of each other from then on.

This review has focused on threefolding, education, and the nature of our human being
in body, soul, and spirit. There is much more to be studied and absorbed in these lectures
about thinking and willing, about how we can learn to balance the influences of Lucifer and
Ahriman with the help of Christ, about how we humans affect large scale events in the
world, and even more.

Footnote 3.
On page 16, Steiner says, "The powers used in Intuition, in intuitive perception, are the same as those active until
the age of 6 or 7 in the growth that finds its expression at second dentition." It is these same forces which are
active in the supersensible perception of Intuition.

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